Hi folks, this is Ian W. Hill, the co-creator and sound designer of the science-fiction sitcom for your ears, Life With Althaar, and I’m here with co-creator and showrunner, Berit Johnson — Hello! — We also both write, act, and do almost all the other jobs on the show
— Along with the other 22 members of the Gemini CollisionWorks theater company
— And we’re coming to you, as always, from the Gemini CollisionWorks Radiophonic Workshop deep below South Brooklyn, an audio wonderland where anything can happen — Duckling stampede! — (sound of duckling stampede)
— Aaah! (ahem) Life With Althaar is our first audio-only production, and what we’ll be sharing with you here in the Nominee Showcase is episode 12, our Holiday episode from this past December, which we think pretty well showcases the actors, writing, sound, and directing on the show. As for what you might need to know about the characters, well, it’s the story of John B
— A spectacularly unlucky Human who was forced to leave Earth after an incident that cost him his job, his girlfriend, his family, and his legal right to call himself Human in the first place — And his friend and roommate, Althaar
— Who is an Iltorian, a species considered throughout the Galaxy to be kindest, sweetest, most delightfully considerate beings you’d ever want to meet — but who look, to Humans, like unspeakable eldritch horrors that we absolutely can’t catch so much as a glimpse of without vomiting in abject terror — And that’s if you’re lucky
— Right. And all this is happening on the Human Exchange Concourse, better known as the Fairgrounds, a space station that was built to host the First Annual Galactic Fair, an event intended to show off Humanity’s greatness to the rest of the Galaxy — and which turned out to be a really good example of why you never call something the “First Annual” until you’re sure there’s going to be a second one. So, the Fairgrounds ended up as a decrepit rest stop for sapients on their way out of Human space to somewhere better, or a permanent residence for folks with nowhere better to go
— We should note that a lot of the staff on The Fairgrounds are robots who were originally built to portray famous figures from Human history. They were reprogrammed to do new jobs, but it wasn’t cost-effective to update their appearances or voices, so some of them may sound familiar
— As for the other non-Human characters: Mrs. Frondrinax is a plant being of the Fugulnari species, who looks exactly like a common parlor palm from Earth — And Lt. Frall, the station’s second-in-command, is an energy being of unknown origins, who perceives reality in 27 dimensions, is probably omniscient, and quite possibly omnipotent
— But other than that, this is just your regular Holiday episode of a sitcom — with a really long running time — so we hope you enjoy “A Very Althaar Christmas” — and we hope that if this is your introduction to Life With Althaar, that you’ll go back and start the story from the beginning, and spend some more time getting to know our friends on The Fairgrounds. So on behalf of Berit, myself, and all of us at Gemini CollisionWorks — thank you for your attention — and it’s a pleasure working for you — (duck quacks)
http://geminicollisionworks.com/.
Twitter: @LifeWithAlthaar
